Word: wildhorn
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Anyone who writes music for songs with titles like This Is the Moment and Once Upon a Dream is hardly likely to be a gloomy Gus. But Frank Wildhorn just may be Broadway's most happy fella. A virtual unknown on the Great White Way nine months ago, he is the composer of two musicals, Jekyll & Hyde and The Scarlet Pimpernel, which have survived mostly scathing reviews to become box-office successes. A self-described "blue-collar professional songwriter" who has supplied material for the likes of Natalie Cole and Whitney Houston, he now has enough theater projects to keep...
Except possibly those mornings the reviews for his shows come out. With the apparent end of Andrew Lloyd Webber's string of hits, Wildhorn has taken over as the middlebrow melodist critics love to hate. His soaring ballads are dismissed as bland pop geared for easy-listening radio; his shows are scorned as cut-rate imitations of Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables. ("The man writes galumphing, dunderheaded musicals that make...everything by Andrew Lloyd Webber seem like great art"--Newsday.) But he is a musical populist and proud of it. "Lyrics can be hard to grasp," he says...
...sluggish retelling of the famous horror tale with hair-flinging histrionics by star Robert Cuccioli; The Scarlet Pimpernel is so cheesily staged that the hero's main feat of derring-do is to pose as a plague victim so all the villains will flee in fear. Yet Wildhorn's music has enough muscle and melody to lift the material and the spirits. He can get our blood flowing with a rousing fight song (Into the Fire in Pimpernel) or brighten a brittle critique of social mores with an infectious melodic motif (Facade in Jekyll). Even when his ballads bog down...
...whatever it is, Julie Andrews, with her outflung smile and crystalline enunciations, still has it. A pity, then, she didn't have richer musical material than the humdrum score by the late Henry Mancini (including songs from the movie such as Le Jazz Hot), with additional numbers by Frank Wildhorn. It's touching, and a little sad, to watch this woman who, nearly 40 years ago, crested to fame in what remains arguably the greatest Broadway musical, My Fair Lady, now throwing herself into songs that have no afterlife; their echoes die even as you're walking up the aisle...